Borland sweetens Kylix discount with new offer

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Borland today sweetened a huge price cut in Kylix, its Delphi development environment for Linux by giving away a server edition away free to anyone who's narrowly missed out on the offer.

The Desktop Edition previously listed at $999 will be priced at $199 until August 23. The dramatic price cut has brought unconfined joy to many Delphi veterans, but not all. Developers who'd invested a grand a pop for the per-seat developer license in recent days were livid. Some were muttering darkly about sending the recently purchased $999 version back to Borland, and buying the discounted $199 version instead. And even Borland's developer relations boss, John Kaster, seemed to agree that they had a point:-

"It sucks," he wrote in a message to the Kylix Usenet group. "I feel we should have simply refunded the difference, and I said so."

But Borland's VP of US channel sales Martin Leahy told us that customers who'd narrowly missed out on the Desktop discount would now get a Server edition, worth $1999, for free. Leahy added that the $199 figure was deemed most likely to stimulate demand for the product. Borland had examined a price of $399, but that was no good to anyone, he told us.

Kylix takes Linux deep into traditional Windows territory as a client/server developer platform, where Borland's own Delphi has slugged it out with Microsoft's Visual Basic for much of the last decade in some bitter and occasionally litigious combat. ®